The Land of Broken Roads

He knew something had changed before he even realized he was waking up. The air was flat and heavy now, fragrant with the scent of earth and humidity. It pressed on him like a blanket, so thick it felt like breathing took effort.

His arms and legs twitched but there was nowhere for them to go. Something had happened and he was half-buried, like an old stone sinking into the dirt.

He had been doing something important. He could feel that, feel the pressure of old urgency in his heart. But whatever it was seemed too distant to remember, already fading away. Still, he couldn’t just lie here forever.

His eyes didn’t obey when he tried to open them. He tried again, but they were sticking to his eyeballs. Dry, as if they’d been closed for far too long. One eye cracked open, just a bit, and with a bit of effort his eyelid peeled its way upward until he could see. Above him was nothing but indistinct, sullen greens. Smudges with no definition. Why could he not see clearly? How long had he been laying here?

He blinked and blinked again and tried to sit up. The dirt gripped him, holding him down with suction force. It clung to his skin, crumbling away as one arm came free, then the other.

He rubbed his eyes with his hands and wiped away something too thick to be tears. Some kind of slime. Revulsion gave him a burst of energy and he tore himself from the ground, trying desperately to wipe whatever it was off his face and hands.

He could see now and he instantly knew this was not a place he recognized. Nothing at all like where he’d just been, which was… he couldn’t remember. But now, all around him in every direction were ferns, tall as his waist. They grew so thick together they left no space between them. The land was flat as far as he could see, nothing but pillars of pale, sullen gray and an ocean of dark green ferns.

No, those were not pillars. His eyes followed one up until it met the dark canopy overhead, where he saw great branches. Not pillars. Trees. Trees taller than reason, hundreds of paces apart. Impossibly tall. Too wide, far too tall. Nothing could be that large. His head swam just looking at them, just trying to comprehend their enormity.

His eyes drifted back downward and he saw clear slime all around him in a thin puddle a foot or two wide, like he had fallen and burst open and that was his insides. It coated him in a layer two inches thick, except where he’d already wiped it off.

Wiping the clinging slime from his body and flinging it away, he saw he had nothing on. That wasn’t right either—there should be something he had on. Clothing. The slime was wrong. He should have clothing. Although the word was in his mind, when he tried to think what clothing looked like, or even what it was, nothing came to him. Nothing but blackest amnesia.

Nothing about who he was, or where he was from, or why he was here. He knew the words; any word he wished to remember came to him instantly. But no pictures came with them, nothing that could tell him what the words truly signified.

Home. A place a person lived. And what did it look like? What sort of place was it? Nothing.

Food. Cart. Street. Cat. Robe. Hand. Hand he knew, since he’d seen his. The only mental image he had of hands, though, were the brief glances he’d given them. Face? Nothing. He hadn’t seen it. He was human and didn’t even know what a human looked like, or what it meant to be one.

Wiping more clumps of slime from his thighs, he realized that his body was wrong. It was only a feeling, not any sort of reliable knowledge, but it wasn’t the body he expected. It was hairless from neck to toes, and that wasn’t right. Was it? He was smooth and a bit pale and the proportions seemed off.

A child. He was a child, a little human still growing. Human progeny, not an adult like he was supposed to be. A grown-up. Right? What did that mean, exactly? He could feel the knowledge just on the edge of his mind, barely out of reach. The harder he struggled to grab it, the farther it slipped away.

He took several deep breaths, trying to force his mind to organize and settle by sheer willpower.

“Alright,” he said aloud. The sound of his voice unnerved him. It shouldn’t be so high. “Alright, where am I?”

Saying it helped him focus. His mind grew a bit clearer.

“I’m a child. I’m in a place I don’t recognize,” he said. What else? “I’ve lost my memory.”

The slime on the ground was already evaporating, leaving clean soil as it dried up and disappeared. He watched it go. It evaporated out of his hair as well, unsticking it from his neck and forehead. Soon his skin was completely dry.

“Lost my memory, and probably other things.”

He turned in a slow circle, looking carefully into the distance for any sign of… of anything.

The forest was stunning, truly. Far, far above, the sky was all green, patterns of light and dark in the rich canopy of leaves. It was too high up for him to see what shape they were, but they caught every spare ray of light and let nothing reach the ground. Not a single sun ray anywhere. Just the dappled greens concealing the entirety of the sky. What was up there? What could live among such impossible heights?

And below the green sky, a vast emptiness of nothing but pale gray tree trunks. A space larger than his mind could take in. And his mind tried—the sights above and below made him think he should be able to comprehend the space in between, to know and quantify it, but he couldn’t. It made him feel like nothing more than a speck.

Here on the ground, dark green ferns covered everything, bumpy as roiling ocean water at night. He paused, wondering what the ocean looked like, and how he knew that word. He had no idea, but he knew the ferns looked like one.

But his thoughts quickly fled each time he simply looked around. The beauty of it all nearly overpowered him. Such majesty, such perfect serenity! He dare not close his eyes and miss something. He had to look, to stare at the ferns and trees and far horizons fading in shadow until he understood.

He had to smell the heavy air, thick with humidity and wet dirt. To feel the earth beneath his toes, dirty and black. He had to take it all in.

“I shouldn’t be here. I don’t recognize this place,” he said. “Something went wrong, and I don’t know what it was.” He tried to remind himself that there was something else, something more important than solemn beauty, but his voice didn’t travel very far. It sank into the ferns and was lost before it could intrude on the eternal silence.

The worry edging in at the periphery of his mind faded into the majestic silence of the forest. Nothing moved, not even a whisper. The forest reposed in grandeur, inviolable. Sacred. He listened for a moment, hearing the blood pumping in his ears before he heard anything else. It was so quiet.

Off in the distance, a bird cawed. He turned to look but couldn’t see it. Would he even be able to spot it, in such a huge space? What did a bird look like?

Either way, the sound relieved him at first, but that faded into subtle dread. The forest grew a shade darker. Potentially sinister. He was alone and recognized nothing, but there were living things out there, things he didn’t know about.

“I’m alone. Alone, alone…” he said, tasting the word. Indeed, were there other people at all? He thought about that for a moment. There should be. He didn’t know who they were, but some part of him remembered the feeling of other people around, in contrast to their stark absence now.

“Alright,” he said aloud again, needing to hear something. “Alright, what do I know? I’m a child and that means I’m weak. Children should be protected, but there’s no one here so I’ll have to do it myself. I need food and water.”

He knew the words ‘eating and drinking’. But the more he tried to call up memories of what food was, what it looked like, how it tasted, the less he knew about it. He let go of the thought, afraid he would chase it away forever.

He needed to get moving. He stuck his foot out, then gulped at the fear that he might have forgotten how to walk. No, no, he didn’t forget. Don’t think, just go.

He walked forward, relaxing as it came naturally. Ferns brushed against his skin as he pushed his way through the still, heavy air. Moving let him smell the humidity, the dark scent of decaying plant life, and richness of the soil below him.

“Okay, I can do this. I need food and water and shelter. I’ll figure out what those are when I see them, but I need them.”

Walking felt good. His body gathered energy as he went, waking up even more. He felt so alive, so much more than he remembered! Oh, what did he remember? That thought slipped away before he could look at it.

Oh well. He grinned and ran, the movement coming as natural as breathing. He sprinted as fast as he could through the ferns, dodging this way and that. The soft, black dirt was perfect for running on. Not a rock or stick to be found, nothing sharp to step on.

He didn’t have so much energy before, so much life and spark. He found himself overjoyed to be so mobile, so free. He laughed and ran all the way around a tree trunk. It left him tired by the end, since he had to go all the way around the roots, too, and they were taller than he was, even fifty paces out from the trunk.

“Hey!” he shouted up the tree trunk. “Hey, is anybody up there?”

Of course there wasn’t, but it felt good to be moving and making noise. No wonder children loved playing! He shouted again, whooping loudly and listening for faint echoes from the tree trunks. The ferns swallowed most of the sound, but not all. His own voice returned to him each time.

He screamed as loud as he could, then listened to see how many echoes he could count. One, two, three four, five…?

A voice came back to him that wasn’t his. His blood froze. What was that, that weird yell? How far away? He held his breath and listened.

It came again. “Where!” it said. The voice was high like his, but inhuman, a growl made of ten squeaks at different pitches. “Where!”

His eyes raced desperately over the greenery to find the source. It was down here with him, somewhere close enough to hear. Where was—

He spotted movement and shot down beneath the ferns. It was coming his way. What had he seen? A dirty green head, long pointy green ears. Something his height, but thicker and dangerous. Gods in Glory, what was that?

“Where!” it called again. “Good boy. Come out!”

The voice drove spikes into his mind. Terror greater than he could resist held him. He couldn’t move. He could only barely breathe.

“Come out! Good boy!”

Whatever it was, it was dangerous. He heard eager malice in its crackling, squeaky voice.

It was coming his direction. It might find him. What should he do?

“Meat! You want? You want? Good boy! Come out!”

Should he fight? No, his arms lacked muscle. Every bit of him was thin and soft. Not even his feet had toughened skin on them. I was strong once, he thought, before that crumb of memory slipped away from him. Maybe he could run? How fast was that thing?

The creature quit yelling. He listened with choking dread as it swished through the ferns, looking for him.

This was it. It was too close. He’d waited too long.

He stood to get a look and nearly fell backward in terror. A revolting green man-shaped thing with a pointed, inhuman face sniffed the air only five paces away. It saw him and fixed its shrunken red eyes on him with predatory exultation. It was only slightly shorter than he was, but thick and corded with muscle. Knotted fingers and toes ended in crumbling yellow claws and long ears jutted out from its head and drooped at the end.

It smacked a long, heavy bone it carried into the dirt so hard the sound shook his lungs.

“Good boy,” it said, face curling into a wide grin of sharp, rotting, black and yellow teeth.

He was dead. His body moved before his mind did. He ran with all the strength he possessed. The monstrous little green man laughed and gave chase.